Ghostly communion: cross-cultural spiritualism in nineteenth-century American literature

Kucich, John

doi:10.1349/ddlp.783

2004

DOI: 10.1349/ddlp.783

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Ghostly communion: cross-cultural spiritualism in nineteenth-century American literature

John Kucich¹

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Cited by 4 publications

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“…Subsequent key explorations of spiritualism’s considerable literary influence on transatlantic Victorian and modernist‐era writing include works by Helen Sword (2002), John J. Kucich (2004), Bown et al. (2004), Sarah Willburn (2006), Bridget Bennett (2007), Jennifer Bann (2009), and Srdjan Smajic (2010).…”

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Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

Ferguson

2012

Literature Compass

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Inaugurated some thirty years ago, the massive resurgence of scholarly interest in nineteenth‐century Spiritualism – a once‐derided heterodox movement which offered believers the opportunity to speak with the dead – continues to gain momentum as we reach the second decade of the twenty‐first century. This article examines how twenty‐first century feminist, cultural studies, post‐structuralist, and periodical studies approaches to the movement develop and differ from those of both its nineteen‐eighties recoverers and indeed its nineteenth‐century practitioners and adherents. What is at stake, intellectually, politically, and ethically, in the ways in which contemporary critics now interrogate and align transatlantic practices of mediumship and séance communication? In particular, I trace the growing challenge to the long‐ubiquitous and near‐exclusive emphasis on the movement’s feminist and proleptically radical dimensions, one which, however laudable in its progressive ambitions, has nonetheless tended to over‐homogenize Spiritualism’s chaotically diverse political and philosophical identifications and to sometimes skew our understanding of its constituency. Recent moves to republish and digitize rare works from the transatlantic Spiritualist archive have the potential to remedy this situation, not by installing an univocal Ur‐meaning for the movement, but by revealing new areas of dynamic tension and cross‐fertilization within it.

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Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

Ferguson

2012

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The Spirit of Labor

Soares

2022

Relig. Arts

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Although typically characterized as authors of social realism or social gospel fiction, respectively, Elizabeth Gaskell’s and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s nineteenth-century industrial novels defy traditional generic designations through their deployment of supernatural and spiritualist discourse to otherwise decidedly earthly and material subjects. Creating a genre that I call spiritual realism, these writers infused realist narratives with the spiritual motifs and images that colored the social and religious ideology of the nineteenth century in order to represent both the material and immaterial realities of their everyday experience. This new spiritual realism allowed writers to depict the nebulous, transitory, and incomprehensible aspects of their everyday reality in an increasingly modern, industrial, and transnational world. In order to establish the centrality of spiritual realism to our understanding of nineteenth-century industrial fiction, this essay examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), emphasizing each author’s deployment of spiritualism to interrogate the morality of industrialization and the treatment of workers.

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A spiritualist perspective on the novel "The Evening Sacrifice" by Pyotr Boborykin

Ustimov

2024

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The relevance of the work is related to the promising direction of studying the influence of non-classical theologies on the poetics of literary texts of the post-Romantic period. The article examines the spiritual poetics of P.D. Boborykin's novel "The Evening Sacrifice". The cultural-historical method allows us to determine the place of spiritual views and practices in the culture and literature of the 19th century, in the consciousness of society and the authors of literary texts. The article analyses the peculiarities of the representation of members of the spiritualist movement in P.D. Boborykin's novel "The Evening Sacrifice". The comparative method is used to compare the representation of spiritualists in Boborykin’s novel with that of his contemporaries – I.S. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky. If for Turgenev and Tolstoy, the fascination with spiritualism is another sign of the idleness and meaninglessness of the aristocracy's life (and in Tolstoy's case, it is also an occasion to show the superiority of peasants over it), then for Dostoevsky, spiritualism reveals the peculiarities of the relationship between faith and fact for a person, which allowed him to deduce the concept of "true realist" Alyosha in “The Brothers Karamazov”, and for Boborykin it is an alternative value system that allows one to reconsider their moral and intellectual views by comparing them with it. The revealed differences allow us to establish the individual characteristics of the views of each of the selected authors. The semiotic method allows us to trace the features of the construction of the poetics of literary texts and the role that spiritualism plays in it. Allan Kardec's religious and philosophical views, which include faith in the evolution of the soul through a series of reincarnations, which can be achieved under the guidance of helping souls of a higher level of development, turn out to be a way of organising the structure of P.D. Boborykin's novel "The Evening Sacrifice", the basis for the dynamics of its plot and the connection of characters. Spiritualism also plays a role in the specifics of the novel's gender issues, which is confirmed by the author's out-of-text testimonies. The results of the research can be applied in the study of the history of Russian literature and the sociology of religion.

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Ghostly communion: cross-cultural spiritualism in nineteenth-century American literature

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

The Spirit of Labor

A spiritualist perspective on the novel "The Evening Sacrifice" by Pyotr Boborykin

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